Archive for October, 2017

In an old New Yorker (from 7/6/15), two cartoons that especially struck me: a Mick Stevens meta-cartoon, and a Liana Finck with a playful word transposition. The second led me to a Finck from this spring that presents a real challenge in understanding.

(Gay porn, fetish gear, men’s bodies, and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Wondering what costume to wear for trick or treating? TitanMen’s ad offering steep discounts on DVDs for the holiday offers fetishwear models in black to guide you. Note: costumes prohibited in public in most jurisdictions.

Unlike trickle treat (reported on here in a 11/27/14 posting), which has a syllabic r (in casual-speech trick or) misheard as a syllabic l (so that trick or is misidentified as trickle), twicker tweet is entirely a matter of production (rather than perception), with [w] for English approximant r [ɹ̠] in child phonology.

Came by on Pinterest some considerable time ago, a photo billed as “Gartenkeramik Reiervogel – ein Designerstück von Brigitte Peglow”, showing a ceramic bird posing in a luxuriant garden, much like this:

(#1) Ceramic bird among variegated vinca, hostas, ferns, and more

Certainly looked like a heron, but I was puzzled by the German noun Reier.

Two recent Zippys offer remarkable vernacular architecture on the US coasts: a great rocky pile of a fantasy home, created by a performer of enormously popular entertainments — a castle on the Connecticut! — on the east, restaurants in the shape of a parasol — SoCal novelty architecture! — on the west:

(#1) Castle built a hundred years ago by actor William Gillette; reminiscent of the house in the Flintstones animated tv series; topped by the Carvel soft ice cream symbol

(#2) Parasol restaurant in SoCal’s Seal Beach (1967), sister to the first Parasol in Torrance (1961)

Yesterday’s lunch, an excuse to use the rice cooker in my kitchen and take advantage of the furikake seasoning Kim Darnell picked up for me in last week’s grocery trip on my behalf. No pictures of the stuff — soupy rice isn’t at all photogenic — but something about the ingredients. Mostly about food, a bit about language.